Jewish Identities for Christians

I never thought about it much, but as a gatekeeper for Jewish identities in several Jewish population studies over the years, I’ve bounced more than a few Christians who seemed theologically inclined to describe themselves as Jewish, but beside their beliefs, nothing else pointed in that direction. I just wouldn’t count them or told the interviewers to thank them, drop them and go on to the next interviews. I wasn’t going to waste precious Jewish communal population research resources on “false positives.”

Brushing the phenomenon off, I never really collated the numbers or went back to do any special statistics or study about this. I just grouped these Christians calling themselves Jews as non-Jews.

People can call themselves anything they like, but as a standard bearer and enforcer for the organized Jewish community, I have to draw the sociological line somewhere. There are also many people who would be considered Jews by other Jews or the State of Israel, but I don’t include them in the Jewish count because they they refuse to consider themselves to be Jewish by religion or other means.

All of this would be of interest as dinner party conversation, but it turns out that is could be a component of rather large error in the newly published estimates of the the size of the American Jewish Community by a group at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. Their estimate at 6.4 million is about a million Jews higher than previously accepted estimates.

In a previous blog I have put forth the arguments of where they may have made some methodological missteps and perhaps overreached in their ability to make accurate estimates with the demographic materials they have on hand. Since they are relying on large survey datasets which haven’t been “cleaned” of Christians calling themselves Jews, its now a topic that may have to be researched and explored in order to find the prevalence of this phenomenon in order to control for it in this type of Jewish population research.

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